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I sort of fell into the testing field:
I learned testing on the job from
some really good people. I used
to think that was exceptional,
but over the years, I realized that
very few people actually plan to
be testers. Sometimes people use
it as a stepping stone to development, but very few people set out
to test as the end goal. Then, once
you become a tester, the next step
is unclear. The perception often
seems to be the choices are stagnate or go into management.
- Ben Simo, Software Tester
Sadly, Ben is not alone in his dilemma.
Where accountants and professors have
a detailed professional career ladder, in
many test organizations the ladder only
has one rung. Ben is quick to add, “In
my mind, this isn’t just a problem for
testers, but often for all of IT. Often the
IT managers are the least qualified managers in the organization. They chose
management as the default, because they
saw no where else to go.”
Shrini Kulkarni, a popular blog author and software tester, recently pointed
out that a management job often leads
to dealing with personnel evaluations,
invoices, payments, recruiting, budgets,
and other aspects of running a business
that may not seem interesting to technical people. Many testers prefer solving
technology-related problems. Therefore,
many testers are more interested in a
technical career ladder, but they may
not see one with their current employer.
If we are responsible for our own professional development, as Alicia Yanik
pointed out in the December 2007 issue
of Better Software, we need to develop
our own professional growth strategy.
In other words, if your company does
not provide a professional development
system, one option is to build your own
ladder—figure out where you want to be
and work with the company to recognize
that growth.
Another Way to Look at It
Software testing is a business, and you
are the product. Your goal is to increase
the value of the product. There are three
common strategies [1] that we can use
to accomplish this goal: cost reduction,
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market focus, and differentiation. In
other words: charge less per hour, know
your customer better, or be “special.”
Charging less per hour may not be
feasible, but if you do, then everyone
competes in this fashion and the result is
a price war. The winner of a price war is
whoever has the lowest cost structure.
A market-focused tester limits himself
to a particular niche, such as Department of Defense contractors, medical
device manufacturers, pharmaceutical
companies, and so on. This can work for
some contractors and job-hoppers, but if
you want to stay in the same company,
it doesn’t help much. Everyone at your
company is a specialist in that field.
The third approach is differentiation.
People willingly pay twice as much for a
bottle of Coca-Cola than a bottle of the
generic stuff—and the same goes for automobiles, laundry detergent, macaroni
and cheese, and even hotel rooms. For
example, Donald Trump has managed
to make his name synonymous with
“expensive … and worth every penny.”
In one episode of his television show, he
essentially slapped his name on bottles
of water and doubled the price. There
are so-called “name brands” in software
testing, too—people who have made
an effort to be better known than their
peers.
This “branding” style of differentiation is reputation and perception,
but sometimes the product actually can
do something unique and different. For
testers, this means specialization, often
in a sub-field that your company does
not currently have. By making this specialization explicit (defined in our job
descriptions), we can demonstrate added
value to the company and then build our
ladder.
But … What Specialty?
Inventing a completely new specialty can be scary. It not only must be
an area in which you are interested but
also must be a role that your organization needs filled. But if the organization
needs it, why isn’t it already being done
by someone else?
Jerry Weinberg suggests generating
ideas for new specialties by taking two
existing things and intersecting them [2].
Figure 1 shows a few examples of roles
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Figure 1: Overlapping roles and possible opportunities
that can be formed by intersections between testing and non-testing groups.
In each of these specialties, we find a
real business need that is served by two
groups. The non-testing group may not
understand or appreciate what your
manager needs, or it may not be serving the needs of the testing organization
well. Perhaps you just like what that
group does and find it interesting. By investing a little bit of time exploring the
intersection of testing and other roles,
you can find out enough to better fill a
need. You may learn enough about the
role to fill in when Bob’s sick or to have
a backup job in case of a layoff.
Once you have identified a specialty,
work at it for six months. Get enough
experience to have something to list on
your annual review. If you really enjoy
the work, you might want to think about
where that could go in five or ten years
and set out some really high-level goals.
In order to have a serious ladder, the role
will have to carry significant responsibility and be of real value to the company.
From concept to Cash
Deciding on a field will give you a
concrete direction. While having a direc38
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tion is great, do you know your longterm goal or destination? Is it clear and
concrete or just warm and fuzzy?
One way to develop longer-term career goals is to work backward from an
envisioned future—or, in the words of
business guru Stephen Covey, “Begin
with the end in mind.” For example,
imagine that some coworkers and friends
are discussing you around the water
cooler five or ten years from now. What
would you like them to say about you?
What role are you in? While “Where do
you see yourself in five years?” might be
a clichéd interview question, “Where do
I want to be in five years?” is a much
more serious one.
Once you have goals that are specific
and realistic, you can time-box them—
which is as simple as creating your own
deadlines to provide motivation. With
time-boxed goals, you can create subgoals, or tactics, that are smaller and
smaller until the pieces are manageable
enough to accomplish. We do this every
day in testing and project management;
it really isn’t that hard to apply to career
growth.
If your goal is to be the go-to guy,
you might sit down with your manager
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and ask for additional responsibility on a highly visible project.
If your goal is to be a developer/
tester, the first step might be to go
to the library and check out two
or three books on development.
If your goal is to earn a college
degree, the first step might be to
find a program that is a possibility, and then take a single college
course.
Along the way, your goal
might change. You might find
that you dislike the pressure of
constant delivery, or that college course might lead you to a
second career as a journalist.
The idea is to do something that
moves you in the right direction
and then adjust your plan as you
go. If you are an “agile” type,
you could think of each of these
steps as an iteration. Each step
provides you with value, feedback, and—because the iterations
are frequent—the opportunity to
adjust.
Love The One You’re With
If your company doesn’t have a technical career ladder, it is possible to develop one, especially at larger companies
with an HR department that employs
a compensation analyst. Microsoft,
for example, has a defined ladder for
every technical role, and the higher levels are well compensated. Alan Page, a
test architect in Microsoft’s Software
Engineering Excellence group, explains
that “The split between management
and non-management typically happens
around the ‘senior’ level. For example,
for software development engineers in
test (SDET), we have SDET I, II, senior
SDET, and principal SDET. A principal
SDET may also go by the title ‘test architect.’ Thus, our newest managers have
several years of testing experience, and
people who choose to remain technical
are given a few more steps on the ladder
to climb.”
Many companies can stand to benefit from defining detailed career paths.
For example, consulting companies can
charge a premium by offering higherlevel consultants, who have more perceived value. If you work for a company
like this, you can demonstrate how
career pathing can make the company
more money. At the same time, a professional ladder will mean more money for
those people willing to climb to the top.
(Hint: That’s you.)
The Career Path Less
Traveled
Without a non-management career
ladder, testers have a false dilemma.
Again, Ben Simo tells the story: “I knew
one excellent tester who was pushed into
management, and he hated it. The truth
was that he wanted to do excellent testing, not personnel evaluations and staffing with Excel spreadsheets. So, after
some time, he convinced the company to
create a test architect role.”
If your company doesn’t have such
a path, it is up to you to carve one out
for yourself. One integral part of any
career management plan is marketing.
As odious as that sounds to many technical people, no matter how much you
know about software testing, if other
people do not realize it, then no one will
be knocking down your door asking to
promote or hire you.
The StickyNotes for this article are
full of ideas that will help you grow professionally and grow your reputation.
The challenge of this kind of growth
is that you want the improvement to
be real, and you want the credit for it.
That is the “marketing” part. To get that
credit, we may need to improve in areas
beyond hard technical skill.
One simple model for this is to think
of inside skills (coding, exploratory testing, test automation) and outside skills
(verbal or written communications, giving and receiving feedback, or supervision). While we don’t have time in this
article to explore all these areas, I feel
obligated to mention that the gap between your current skills and where you
want to be might be technical and headsdown, or it might be how you interact
with the world. In sales, management, liaison, and consulting roles, outside skills
can far outweigh inside skills. Even the
best technician is stuck if he can’t work
with people or communicate his value.
Getting the credit for our work can
be very challenging. When I interviewed
John McConda, a performance tester
for Mobius Labs, he pointed out that it
is very hard, if not impossible, to put “I
read a book” on a résumé. Even if you
read and applied the ideas in the book,
it can be hard to take that credit. John’s
suggestion is to learn new technology,
then find opportunities to use those technologies in the workplace. Or, if you enjoy reading, then form a book club, host
a brown-bag session, or champion some
other form of distributed learning. Then
not only can you claim it on your résumé but you also are building personal
relationships, which are the best kind of
recommendations.
The biggest, most positive career
moves I ever made were in building
things. In 1998, I founded the West
Michigan Perl User’s Group (“Perl Mongers”), and in 2006, I co-organized the
first Great Lakes Software Excellence
Conference (GLSEC.org). These led directly to jobs and interviews from hiring
managers.
Building events and organizations follows the general pattern of giving things
away. When I say giving things away,
I don’t mean a pen or a key chain, but
rather ideas and your time. Start a blog
or a brown bag. Learn a technique, do it,
then bring the rest of your team along.
It may take time, but people will notice,
and when it’s your time to ask for help,
they may be in a position to help you.
My advice is to pick two to four things
that provide the best return on investment and pursue them aggressively.
NETWORKING
Networking is an extremely common
practice, but it amazes me how it is
so poorly understood. Yes, you can go
to meetings, collect business cards,
and aggressively pursue relationships
with people who are in a position to
help you. It is even possible that this
process works! It just feels a little
mercenary to me. I have colleagues
who “network” this way, and when
I answer a call from them, the first
question out of my mouth is usually
something like “What do you want
this time?”—only a little more polite.
When I think of networking, I think
of the opposite. Instead of trying
to get, I try to give—finding out
what I can do to help the other
person. For job seekers, that might
mean an introduction. For volunteer
organizations, that might mean
stepping in and filling a role. At
conferences, it can be as simple
as listening and offering advice or,
even easier, listening and offering
sympathy.
Tomorrow
If your organization has a professional
development ladder, it is probably vague
by design. Sit down with your manager
and find out specific, measurable goals
to demonstrate accomplishment of the
next level. If there is no ladder, the first
part of the conversation is how to create
one. If the organization balks, you can
figure out where you want to be, what
to do to get there, and how to make sure
the effort is noticed. Earlier I mentioned
redefining your role in a way that adds
unique value to the company. After a
few months of effort, you can ask that
this new role be designated “tester II,”
“senior tester,” “performance test specialist,” or so on. There are several Web
sites that recommend how to redefine
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A few of my colleagues also network
in this way. When I receive a call
from them, I am quick to answer it,
because I know the conversation will
be about an opportunity that is to my
advantage.
Now, when 90 percent of our phone
conversations are to my advantage,
and the one time comes when you
need my help … that is when the
professional network you’ve built can
come to your aid.
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StickyMinds.com
Map out your project success
using StickyMinds.com as
your resource guide
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your job or role formally in order to advance technically; I am suggesting that
you actually do it informally first, so
you’ll have a leg to stand on.
I would go so far as to suggest that
additional work beyond forty hours
a week should be invested in you, not
project work. Stephen Covey refers to
this as “sharpening the saw”—doing
personal work to make your professional work go faster. This could be
contributing to open source projects, experimenting with new technologies and
techniques, or just keeping up with the
software testing literature.
This research and experimenting
can create some real options beyond
going into management, which brings
us back to our original dilemma and
my colleague Steve. With nearly thirty
years of software experience, Steve has
worked for a large government agency,
and multiple Fortune 500 companies,
and earned a master’s degree from Johns
Hopkins University along the way. In his
words, “The choice to stay technical is
not a quick and easy way—in fact, you
have to build your own way. Staying
current is hard. I strive to add something
to the résumé every six months, live a
thrifty life, save and invest some of my
income, maintain relationships, and
contribute a little bit to my peers and my
community.”
Steve is quick to add: “There is nothing wrong with going into management,
but my choice has been to avoid it. The
problem is when you make the decision
by default, or let someone else make it
for you.” {end}
References:
1] Porter, Michael J. Competitive Strategy. Free
Press, 1998.
2] Weinberg, Jerry. Becoming a Technical
Leader. Dorset House, 1986.
Sticky
Notes
For more on the following topic go to
www.StickyMinds.com/bettersoftware.
n
Professional resources
user groups and professional associations
Working in technology— especially
software testing—can feel isolating, but
believe it or not, there are people near
you who struggle with the same thing.
Every large metropolitan area (and most
medium ones!) has formal user groups
that meet regularly. User groups typically
meet monthly, at lunch or dinner meetings;
some may even have an annual conference
or other large event. These organizations
are always looking for board members,
speakers, and attendees.
If you aren’t the “toot my own horn”
speaker type, there are a number of
non-glory jobs like secretary or program
chair. People appreciate and notice these
contributions, especially when they
are done well. Some of my strongest
relationships—and a job or two—came
through working as a volunteer for
my local Perl user group and Extreme
Programming group.
Here are a few large, national groups that
may have a chapter in your area. If there
is no user group in your area, the easiest
way to become a recognized “name” in
town is to start one.
• The Agile Alliance is an informal group
that specializes in agile development.
www.agilealliance.org/show/1641
• The Association of Information
Technology Professionals (AITP) leans
more toward hardware and networking,
but each chapter has its own flavor.
(The AITP was originally the Data
Processing Management Association,
so it has been around for some time).
www.aitp.org/index.jsp
• The American Society for Quality (ASQ)
has chapters all over the United States,
and includes representatives from all
aspects of business and government.
www.asq.org/sections/find.html
• The Quality Assurance Institute (QAI) is
a very software-focused version of the
ASQ. www.qaiworldwide.org/chapters/
index.html
• The Association for Software Testing
(AST) is dedicated to software testing
and just began a local chapters
program.
www.associationforSoftwareTesting.org
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